Politicians in Washington D.c. have cooked up a nice way to re-create the mistakes of the Great Depression by attaching a ‘Buy American’ provision onto the stimulus bill making its way through Congress. Apparently the Canadians and Europeans have already voiced their concerns, with the Europeans threatening to retaliate.

This is pretty funny actually (Hat tip Michael Turk).

ShareRemember to switch your RSS feed to http://www.creditwritedowns.com/feed since FeedBurner has not been forwarding my feed correctly.
The Most Popular Twitter Acronyms – Digital Inspiration
Wall Street suffers worst January – BBC News
Outlook for Japan’s economy worsens – FT.com
Rogoff: The Global Credit Drought – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
Fed’s Credit Flirtation Muddles Exit Strategy: Caroline Baum – [...]

ShareEvidence that companies think that much of the downdraft in the economy represents a structural shift to a lower revenue base instead of a cyclical shift comes from the enormous goodwill writedowns companies are taking.  Case and point is the $34 billion writedown by ConocoPhilips which I highlighted (Note of disclosure: I am fairly bullish [...]

I have been out the entire morning and haven’t been able to read any news reports on the GDP numbers. However, I have just now had a chance to look at the data and wanted to share my thoughts with you, unfiltered by the media reports. I would sum it up by calling it a story about the three I’s of imports, inflation and investment. But, I will also have a few words to say about state and local government spending as well.

Wading into the controversy surrounding Peter Schiff’s investment under-performance, the Wall Street Journal has released an article which calls into question the fundamental arguments for Schiff’s investment strategy. Schiff, a fund manager often seen on television, has significantly underperformed the rest of the U.S. stock market, which itself saw a drop of nearly 40% last year. The question is why. Judging from the Journal piece his approach was aggressive and ill-timed. To my mind, this calls into question whether these losses can ever be recouped down the line. I have highlighted in bold the salient points of the article below.

The monthly Nationwide Building Society survey is out for house prices in the U.K. The data show an annual fall that is the steepest on record at 16.6%. This means that house prices are now falling more rapidly than ever in the U.K. and that spells bad news as its economy has just entered recession.

You heard the quotes (China slams U.S. profligacy). Here’s the video. After some brief introductory remarks Chinese Premier Wen gets down to ripping into the United States.

If you want to get right to his most quotable remarks, they begin right about 6:00 in this long video. Definitely worth watching.

Here it is, my daily smörgåsbord of links from around the web. As usual, these links spathe world of economics, finance and politics. But, I will also start inserting a few links on technology as well because I am a bit of a technophile. You can see some of my Tech blog links in the blogroll.

Before I finish, I want to sound off about Google. The company has become a bit of a 900 lb. elephant on the Internet. They have way too much control for my tastes. I have found this out recently in particular because there is no substitute for FeedBurner, which has been syndicating my feeds. Basically, FeedBurner blows and I am sick of my feed being down and screwing up my site. So, I have unlinked my primary feed from FeedBurner. If you are getting my feed via FeedBurner, don’t. T he best feed is http://www.creditwritedowns.com/feed. Please use this feed going forward if you want any measure of reliability.

Whew. I am glad I got that off my chest.

Ed

You may have heard about the Rags-to-riches movie “Slumdog Millionaire” which recently won a Golden Globe for Best Picture. I saw the film and thought it was brilliant. Nevertheless, not everyone agrees with this sentiment, as the video below will attest. Some are calling the film voyeuristic poverty porn and are quite upset about it.

I should also note that child actors in the film are said to still be living in the same slum circumstances they were plucked from before the film started.